#1198 Rancid - ...And Out Come the Wolves

I can't get past Rancid's a-little-too-late uncoolness, especially on singles like Ruby Soho and Time Bomb, but they do occasionally shred. There's nothing in this world like the bass on Maxwell Murder, and the bass is the highlight throughout, but this doesn't read of sincerity, and without sincerity, what's left of punk? Also, your punk album is going to be this long you better go full Clash and tap a dozen styles, this would have been better as a 28-minute sharp instrument 3/5

#1197 Jeff the Brotherhood - Past 7 Recordings

Half best-of / half rarities album, this singles collection is end-to-end riffs that burst with energy and fun, with just a bit of a nasty streak, just a touch of arty indulgence, sounding a like a less-serious Queens of the Stone age, a less-stoned Wavves, or a more-focues Thee Oh Sees. Which is to say, fuck yes 4.5/5

#1196 George Harrison - All Things Must Pass

Somewhere along the way the 3rd more famous Beatle made an album that brings a lot of what you love about the Beatles, without quite sounding like its trying to recreate the Beatles. The songs don't sound as forcedly pop as Paul's, nor as defiantly un-pop as John's - this sounds like a guy out there doing what he wants to do, making the kinds of songs he'd like to make, and they're kind of great. Exciting, dense, easy, surprising, this is a powerfully listenable album 4.5/5

#1195 Robert Wyatt - Rock Bottom

Strange stuff. Arty, droning songs with little interest in traditional structure or tunefulness, with shades of late Talk Talk and Radiohead, especially on highlight Little Red Riding Hit the Road. It's mostly pretty unpleasant to listen to, with its laconic pacing and Wyatt's whining cries, but it's inventive stuff way ahead of its time and worth hearing once for the adventurous listener 3.5/5

#1194 Simon and Garfunkel - Bookends

Still super pretty, but more adventurous than you might guess, from the "did this thing start playing another album" noisebomb of Save the Life of My Child, to the droney opening and reverbey handclaps of Fakin' It, to whatever Voice of Old People is. This is surprisingly vibrant stuff, full of lyrical twists but not wholly reliant on them (I'm looking at you most-other-folk-acts) 4/5

#1193 Floh de Cologne - Fleissbandbaby's Beat-Show

Like German Frank Zappas, these guys roar maniacal through fragments of rock and pop and culture, making a defiant racket that's occasionally hooky, but mostly too scattered to really work as music you'd like to hear 3/5

#1192 Nocando - Jimmy the Burnout

Maybe this is what Nocando was going for with the mostly-unsuccessful Tits and Explosions - here's some rap that's more personal and less superficial (less fun) than his debut. The production's less bonkers, with more heft (less fun), the lyrics more meaningful if a little less playful rhythmically and rhymewise, and yes, less fun.

Notice a theme? It's a real hip hop album, full of cleverness and big moments, especially near the end on Zero Hour / Hellfyre Club Anthem, but I still miss that freedom of a rapper with nothing to lose 3/5

#1191 Association / Pierre Courbois - Earwax

Extra-jazzy, rock-insturmentated, bass-driven fusion - if you're coming at this from a rock perspective think a mellowed-version of out Squarepusher's debut plus a more-spastic instrumental Steely Dan album and you're basically there. It's exciting stuff, only occasionally aimless, full of countless swerves and left turns 4/5

#1190 Niagara - Niagara

Two sidelong songs, just drums. I'll say this, if you're gonna make an album of just drums, this is about as good as you can make it, full of immense motion and melody and voice. This begs to be chopped up into breakbeats for banging synths, but as it stands, its a fascinating, boring, must-hear album 3.5/5

#1189 Amon Duul II - Yeti

An endless, deeply psychedelic, mostly instrumental krautrock double album - this is some heavy shit. The first disc sure's got hooks to spare, and if you're even the littlest bit outspaced it will lull and thrill with the best of em. Make sure you're good and gone by the time you put the second disc on though, because it kicks off with a solid half hour of improvised, severely unfocused jamming, with the everchanging bassline providing most of the intrigue. A strange, difficult, unfrustrating listen, recommended if you've got an hour or so to burn 3.5/5

#1188 Simon and Garfunkel - Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme

God dammit guys, I really don't want to like you. Damned folkies, with all your weepy sentimentality and frail wordplay and spare musicality. But this album's just got hooks on hooks on lush motherfuckin production, and it even rocks here and there. It's fun! Dammit! I *am* feelin goovy now! I begrudgingly, surprisingly, upvote its classic status.

The fact they take a shit on Dylan, who I'm liking less and less as the years go by, also helps make them my horse in this unseemly race they called folk 3.5/5

#1187 Sunbirds - Sunbirds

Sunbirds songs start with a tower of bass, front and center, big and bold an insistent and consistent, and from there they swirl around, organs, funk guitars, flutes playing jazzy little licks spiraling around like someone opened the containment unit. If it's jazz it's free, if it's funk it's right spaced out, and whatever you call it it's freaked out and cool, soothing and exhausting and strange 3.5/5

#1186 The Prodigy - Fat of the Land

You could scarcely escape the 90's not knowing what this sounds like: giant breakbeats, giant synths-as-guitars, giant sneering and moaning about gothy stuff. With a little distance, I gotta admit, its exciting. It plays basically the same trick for its entire runtime, but it's good fun - turns out those beats actually do good make for a pretty good rockist thrillride, even if the whole thing is profoundly uncool in a way we normally reserve for the 80's 3/5

#1185 Bob Dylan - Desire

Bob Dylan's heavier and hookier than ever here, but as usual he's not one for the ol' restraint and every good thing he finds he rides until it's dead and rotten. Take the boy-girl country vocals, those molting strings, and whatever the fuck Joey is, which would have been a better song if it was literally a fifth as long. 2:12 would have been plenty. The sole survivor is Hurricane, which is just so damn strong it somehow stays interesting for its deeply-repetitive 8 minutes.

Look, the long message-driven songs might have been important at some point, but they're a smokescreen for a lack of decent music. If you can't deliver your message with some tunefulness, with some sense of listening pleasure, maybe you shouldn't be delivering your message as a song. Take out a full page ad or something.

I get how Dylan was revolutionary in the 60's, but I don't know how this isn't seen as part of some late way-past-his-prime slump. This is How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb at best 1.5/5

#1184 Future Islands - Singles

Love that bass, that trickling electronic backing, but that voice is a no, Samuel Herring's faux-operatic, grunty wobble just reads melodramatic and forced. Bet they're a blast live, where they can generate the energy and importance necessary to make this live up to itself, but on the record it just embarrasses 2.5/5

#1183 Tokyo Police Club - Forcefield

I keep giving these guys a shot based on their debut EP, which was a hooky, bass-rattling, angular explosion of skeletal pop-punk. By now they've dropped every word of that description except pop. There's nothing here, the hooks are overdone, the whole thing overproduced into oblivion, like Weezer circa Beverly Hills, like Blink 182 without the wit or hooks, taking zero chances. And no, clumsily stapling your first three tracks together into a 3-part, 8-minute song does not constitute taking a chance, especially when that track consists mostly of Vampire Weekend worship.

Look. These guys are fine as a nonsense pop rock bands go, but I give them shit because I know they're better than this 2/5

#1182 Liars - Mess

Liars albums have always had a smattering of thrilling, perfect, noisy post-post-punk songs peaking out from a sea of admirable but deeply boring, falsetto-drenched noise experiments. But its telling that their 1st-2nd-3rd-4th-5th albums contribute 4-3-2-2-1 songs, respectively, to my Fun Liars mix. Returns be diminishing.

While I don't think they'll ever top their debut, this is the pinnacle of post-TTUAIATASAMOT output, all that experimental drone wrapped into dancable shapes: all that hypnosis and tension used to make your body move, a menacing, wooly, wholly engaging pile of beats and drones and moans. The first half is hugely listenable, especially lead single Mess on a Mission. It's not quite as mindblowing in the highlights as their previous albums, heck, at least it represents something you can actually put on and *enjoy* for more than a track at a time. The second half disappears again, but by then you might actually have been soothed into it.

I might like this because it feels like the payoff for years of suffering through interesting and awful Liars songs, but I do like it a hell of a lot 4/5

#1181 Nocando - Tits and Explosions

Nocando grows up, tries to make a (concept?) album about relationships and feelings, doesn't altogether succeed. He kicks things off namedropping rappers he's not, but then blows that distance doing vague impression of a bunch of other rappers. The effortlessness is lost, the choruses are more important, that couldntgiveafuck energy up in smoke. The spell broke in here somewhere, but word is his new one's pretty good, here's hoping he comes back 2.5/5

#1180 The Chemical Brothers - B-Sides Vol. 1

Quirky castoffs with none of that early era breakbeat muscle, this is all Surrender-and-onward housey squiggle experiments. It's uneven, not particularly memorable, but thoroughly enjoyable in the listen, full of living slither and animal bump, especially on that killer little opener 3.5/5

#1179 Supertramp - Breakfast in America

A cloyingly perfect abomination of pure symphonic pop, Journey's face on ELO's body with the soul of Meatloaf and the heart of Boston. So perfect that you hate it, so perfect that you love it. Because when I say it's perfect I mean it, those sax rips, those bass runs, that jaunty vocal bounce, it's all so damn good, you recoil into a hug, fall smilingly into its arms shimmering with pop magic shivers 4/5

#1178 VA - Afrobeat Airways 2: Return Flight to Ghana 1974-1983

Skittery polyrhythms, looping, dubby bass, and then a big blast of whatever you got over top, chants, cries, horn squeals, guitar jaunt, shapes of rock and pop and funk and jazz appearing almost by coincidence. Fans of Tropicalia will find a familiar feel, but beware that beat, that skitterey insistence keeps things taut and tense even as the rest of the music tries to hypnotize and hook. A wooly, knotty little piece of something sure to please the adventurous 3.5/5

#1177 3 Colours Red - Pure

Blindingly straightforward 3-chord 90's rock, full of big solos, always full speed, always full volume, this is perfectly pleasant near-pop, near-punk. Straightforward's sometimes a bad thing: the songs lean on their respective one big chorus hook again and again, pure verse chorus verse, with a bridge or solo or build placed at about the same spot every time. But when that hook's really good, when that extra move really drives it home, like on the killer one-two punch of Sixty Mile Smile and Sunny in England, you'll be glad to ride that sweet thing to the ends of the earth 3/5

#1176 The Specials - The Specials

If you want to listen to ska for some reason, this is as good as it gets. Laid-back, OG two-tone bounce and sneer, that little punkish disgust stirred into a stew that's surprisingly fun, simmering song after song, only occasionally catching fire. I like it better than The Clash's excursions into Reggae - not that that's saying much 3/5

#1175 Mansun - Attack of the Grey Lantern

A deeply British album, with that Blur-y disapproval and a post-Madchester onandonandon structure, every song seemingly built for a live raveup where repetitions melt time. The vocals are the at the center, soaring skyhigh over jangly guitars, while a loose story of depravity falls out (don't be fooled by the surely-ironic secret track claiming The Lyrics Aren't Supposed to Mean that Much).

These guys were weird - hard-drinking, self-sabotaging cads getting by on the Devil's luck - it all comes out in this, an eccentric, ill-focused big-little record that disappears into itself, sitting there on the couch while you wonder what it's thinking about 3.5/5

#1174 Diiv - Oshin

Shit - did I already blow my quota of the word "krauty"? Months ago, you say?

Well this certainly lays down an insistent, propulsive beat and rides it forever, mixing equal parts Marquee Moon chug, Autobaun clipalong, and, well, The War on Drugs shimmer and shine. It doesn't work as well as that last-reviewed album, running a little too waterey, leaning to hard on the same little chiming arpeggios, sounding like something out of Costa Mesa circa 2003 (that's bad). Perfectly agreeable, with a little muscle around Druun 2, but mostly it just motors on and on without getting anywhere 3/5

#1173 The War on Drugs - Lost in the Dream

Endless chugging, krauty washes of sound with affable, understated Springsteenian crooning over the top, with big emotional surges like those found in dreams, lurching toward nothings that pulse away at the barest glance. The whole thing bleeds together, beating with Broken Social Scene horn buzzes and guitar wobble, barely an album so much as a sound that goes on and on. There's a lot of albums that do that on accident, but this one does it on purpose, and damn it it works, lulling you until you loll along with a dim, sleepy half-smile 4/5

Edit: wow. Did not even notice that that was the title of the album when I wrote that. Aptly named, then.

#1172 Nocando - Jimmy the Lock

Nocando's one of the best rappers around today, nailing the balance of clever twists, machinegun pyrotechnics, and dumb-fire headbobbing cadence. Better yet, his flow works perfectly with this album's buzzy, warped-synth, scattershot production, full of loopy swoops and drops. One of the most fun, rock-flecked rap albums I've heard in a long time 4/5

#1171 Perfect Pussy - Say Yes to Love

I'm all for some shouting over flayed guitars, but Meredith Graves's particular yelp ruins a perfectly good noisy, clusterfuck, running alongside it without any particular effort or integration, until every song sounds like two unrelated songs playing at once, which is maybe because they record the songs first, and then sing and make noise over them. That's a pretty lazy approach that results in some pretty shitty rock and roll, but I guess it wins some special art points or something. It's like George Lucas splicing different takes together and calling it a scene - no wonder it doesn't have any soul to it.

Here's all this clattering drumwork and guitar noise and its actually pretty intricate and exciting, and then there's just this megaphone-blasted yalp! yelp! yalpyalp! yelp! yelp! yelp! whiiiiiine! yalp! yalp! yalpyelp! yelp! It doesn't sound daring, it sounds lazy.

I hear that underneath it all there's these great lyrics and deep truths, but I can't reasonably recommend this to anyone when it's willfully, strenuously buried anything good about itself in layers of bullshit just to make you work for it. That's not punk, that's not rock and roll, that's just hipster marketing in 2014 1.5/5

#1170 Eagles - Hotel California

Can I get a "I hate the fuckin' Eagles"?

Eagles are...fine? Like Steely Dan with less chops, or maybe a softer Steve Miller Band, or a countrified Bryan Adams. If you don't think those bands are cool, Eagles are even less cool, just watery and wandering. Musical, sure, but totally underwhelming, I can't figure out why these guys get so much credit 2.5/5

#1169 Bob Marley - Exodus

I'm really not into Reggae, just find it too one-two note, too smoothed out - even if that is the point. So take it with a grain of salt when I say that this is possibly the best Reggae album I've heard, with a slow-shifting variation that keeps thing moving, even if it doesn't quite keep them interesting 3/5

#1168 Simon and Garfunkel - Bridge Over Troubled Water

Oh Simon and Garfunkel, why do you seduce me the way you do. I don't like folk, generally don't give a fuck about lyrics, and find myself disinclined to listen to you at any given moment. And yet! This is so damned pretty, the vocals impossibly sweet, the backing understated and lush, those melodies! Those harmonies! And then you have something like The Boxer, where I find myself listening to and even enjoying the lyrics despite myself, and I end up smiling all album long without even realizing it, without knowing why. Damn you! 4/5

#1167 Van Halen - Van Halen

Van Halen falls into that category - I don't know what it's called, but it includes Van Halen, AC/DC and Aerosmith, bands making that sleazy, slightly adolescent, arena-ready, fist pumping, pre-80's 80's rock that I generally don't much like.

If you're going to listen to an album like that though, this is one of the best of the lot. The guitars are legit, with that cavernous live reverb and these impossibly overlayered vocals, the band singing along with itself. It's vital, rocking, and barely embarrassing at all! 3.5/5

#1166 Talking Heads - More Songs About Buildings and Food

I've always appreciated Talking Heads, even if I've never quite loved them the way I feel like I'm supposed to - this falls into about the same spot, full of funk-filled post-punk bristle and crack. Things are even dancier than usual, skipping along deftly, and The Big Country is a classic beauty, but the album somehow never quite takes off, its like watching that guy dancing at the wedding, and you know he could dance right well if he stopped thinking about it, but you can watch the self-consciousness in every pop. I'm Not in Love kind of throws the rest of the album under the bus: its so vibrant and noisy and exciting you ask "why can't the rest of the album be like this?" An exciting, frustrating listen 3.5/5

#1165 Aerosmith - Rocks

Aerosmith jettisoned the juvenalia on this album, leaving nothing but the actual rock and roll, and it makes all the difference. They're actually a pretty kicking band, full of punchy boogie grooves and shreddy guitars. The vocals still sound like they're being dragged from Tyler's throat, but if you can get past it (I mostly can't) there's fun to be had. I still don't like Aerosmith, and they still sound really uncool here, but for the first time I can see why they get any respect at all 3/5

#1164 Deep Purple - Machine Head

This gets put in a big 3 metal pantheon with Zeppelin and Sabbath's masterpieces, and while I don't think its nearly as exciting as those, it does have a damned deep groove, that stoner metal vibe on lockdown. But then that's kind of all it has - Highway Star and Smoke on the Water are classics, but those pretty much outline the basic pace, key, feel, and tone of the rest of the album. There's little here that will really excite the imagination in 2014: its a smoothed out, tuned down, head bobbing hard rock groove that goes and goes end to end, and depending on where you're at, that might be enough 3.5/5

#1163 Paul McCartney and Wings - Band on the Run

With the exception of the wooly, exciting title track, each song is seemingly made entirely of choruses, taking some mushy piece of prettiness, wheeling it around and around and around until you've lost track of it. When the song ends you're left with a line ringing in your ears like a hypnotic suggestion, but little sense of the song you've just heard. The hooks *are* pretty and the production's lush, but you don't get the sense of a song here - which is a pretty weird thing to say about a band fronted by a Beatle. If yall'll indulge me I'm gonna dub it the chocolate bunny record - sweet but hollow, less than it seems and more than you need 3/5

#1162 Supertramp - Crime of the Century

This is a band that doesn't know its limits. Supertramp makes perfectly good ELOesque, twisty, funky prog-lite, but they grasp at Pink Floyd grandiosity and never quite get there, and repeatedly wind themselves up on nothing little underclever phrases.

Worse, musically, its numerous flashes of brilliance, its clever rhythms and melodies, are undermined by nasal, strained, underpowered singing that makes the whole thing dissonant and tense, like watching a child struggle to get out of a pool.

Failing as art, succeeding only occasionally as pop. Awkward 2.5/5

#1161 Pink Floyd - Meddle

Pink Floyd really committed to the whole waterey, ethereal thing on this one, skipping the the skeleton-building step and just letting it all wash and fade. Even when the riffs come, they're awash in subtle, full-bodied studio fuckery that today's indie watery domestics couldn't dream to strive to. The gigantic sidelong closer is the highlight, majestically listenable, even the boring sections justifying themselves as setup to payoffs that deserve them - it's a goddamn masterpiece of fearless pacing 4/5

#1160 Rush - Hemispheres

This is the kind of stuff that makes people hate prog, with Geddy's vocals at their most tuneless, the lyrics at their most preposterous, the sidelong opener desperately meandering (though that bass part at 16:00 or so is almost worth the price of admission). Look, I love prog, and I like Rush, but this has little of the immediate punch of Moving Pictures, little of the visceral thrills of 2112, and doesn't really work as spacy atmospherics either. Without purpose on one of those damn fronts the chops don't mean a thing 2.5/5

#1159 The Rolling Stones - Sticky Fingers

On the heels of a seemingly endless run of insanely solid, vaguely similar, incrementally stranger (or in the case of Satanic Majesty's, a lot stranger) albums there's nowhere left to go but everywhere, pointed inward. It's an odds and ends collection of leftover songs that hangs together pretty darn well, simultaneously adventurous and a return to roots, soulful and satisfying and subtly strange. One of their more thrilling albums, though I can't put my finger on why, which is probably why 4.5/5

#1158 Black Sabbath - Vol. 4

What more can I say, Sabbath rules. I know pretty late to the party on this - I had this mistaken impression that Sabbath was all Paranoid and Iron Man, all dead-simple metal trudging.

But the variety of textures, tones, and moves on this and Master of Reality is stunning. Just listen to Supernaut, that incredible riff, the way the bottom drops out at 2:40 and builds back in as barely-there acoustic substrumming - impossible. This is all eternal wriggling out from under its own massive heaps of riffs. Here's so much about what I liked about bands from The Smashing Pumpkins to Boris, and I knew the line was that this was where it all started, but until you hear these two albums you won't understand how true it is - legendary-sized, near-perfect rock and roll 4.5/5

#1157 Aerosmith - Toys in the Attic

Let's keep the hate train rolling: other things I hate: AC/DC. Fuck their snotty little shtick.

I never much liked Aerosmith, growing up assaulted by their various 90's Alicia Silverstone-featuring videos - they always seemed like deeply uncool, lecherous old fools. 45 year-old men shouldn't be putting videos of their teenage daughters in leather pants on TV. No excuses.

I assumed they used to be better, and that's where it gets all double edged, all AC and DC: the riffs are solid, the pacing brisk, the bass wiry and spry // the attitude is cringe-inducingly juvenile, full of weakass double entendres (Uncle Salty, Adam's Apple, Big Ten Inch Record, and those are just the song titles). Musically, it's rock and roll, worthy of big ups, brimming with energy, but its so profoundly uncool, so prematurely lecherous, that it's pretty tough to actually enjoy 3/5

#1156 Dolly Parton - Coat of Many Colors

By all accounts I shouldn't like this, with that mousey little yalp on all the attacks, all the sustains all aquiver, but the songwriting's just that good, full of gorgeous sway and flow, an oozing pathos jelly doughnut glistening and bouncing along. The sun just shines into every dark crany here, toe won't stop atappin 3.5/5

#1155 New Order - Power, Corruption and Lies

I fucking hate the 80's, its music most of all. I mean, not really, but if me and the 80's any two other decades are playing Marry Fuck Kill it's gonna be neon everywhere.

And this is wicked 80's. And look, it pulls it off in places - take that sprightly Dying Falls bounce of Age of Consent, that muscular pulse, that fragile vocal line. It's a great, great trick. Problem is, its variations on a theme pretty much all album long, muscular synth pulse, frail vocals, chiming guitars, all with strangely similar melodic lines. The variations are good, but you'll keep wondering if you haven't shuffled your way back to a song you've already heard. If you're up for evolving echoes on a sound, and that might even be a brilliant intentional move here for all I know, you might find a lot to like here 3.5/5

#1154 The Men - Tomorrow's Hits

This is missing some of the visceral thrill of Open Your Heart, but The Men continue to be a rocksolid rock band dropped out of time into the now, some alternate reality coked-out Muswell-era Kinks, some simmering Stones offshoot, all kicked out with a an understated pop of swagger. That bass rolling on like goddamn on Different Days. This is the album Reflektor wanted to be, that frantic, dancable energy, that Japandroids shout of now.

There's some something weird in the rockandroll water right about now. Bands cranking out albums of uncommon quality with uncanny ease. Thee Oh Sees, Guided By Voices 2.0, The Men. For the second time on this blog, I'm calling Quantum Leap - these guys have chops and confidence and relentless rolling power that you only get with a lifetime of living and a lifetime of making music 4/5

#1153 Bleached - Ride Your Heart

One part lady-Wavves, with Bangles clammy, clanging, ringing vocals, one part lowkey, hazy Slow Jabroni Surfer Blood chug. The faster tracks are the finest, dig that enormous opening guitar paean on Waiting By The Telephone. But everything sounds just a bit slower and sludgier than it has to, all a bit affected with layers of stoney gossamer haze. Example: does the finest moment of Outta My Mind have to sound like, to paraphrase Brent DiCrescenzo, a dinosaur shitting out the Buffy theme? You want to smack this album - get the fuck out of bed, you've got so much potential!

Side note: eventually, you can't save everyone, even if you care about them terribly 3.5/5

#1152 The Raincoats - The Raincoats

Fuuuuuuuck. This album will kick you in your gender-specific genitalia, and if it doesn't check sure you got em. A visceral slash of rock and fuck you fucking roll, worth every swearing syllable, as riffs fuck the idea of riffs, running right down the strings all wrongwise\\ Drums splatter. Vocals careen.

Starting off blindingly thrilling\\, ending blindingly dissonant\\, all along the way you'll be blinded and you better learn to use other senses. Start with hearing\\, and listen to this, and be blinded anew, and blew the fuck a way. A goddamned brilliant slash of punk (?) that will melt your motherfucking face. If you don't like this album, fuck you. 4.5/5